All a cactus needs to survive outside its natural habitat is sunlight and a little bit of water. What it needs to thrive is another matter.

The San Pedro cactus that fills the front window of Eve Young's Colonial in Glen Ridge is a healthy tangle of dark green stalks protruding from three spines about 4 feet tall. It was no bigger than a fist when Young received it as a hostess gift 30 years ago; it has moved with Young and her family from Santa Fe, N.M., to New York City to the Jersey suburbs.

Her secret? "More attention than you think."

That is Young's gift. In the many roles she has played in her 57 years -- wife, mother, PTA president, Native American activist, race relations facilitator, volunteer domestic abuse counselor and, most recently, a certified celebrant who shepherds families through life-changing events -- Young listens, guides, nourishes. Her supple, soothing voice is like a deep, slow-moving river; her presence is as still as the Oklahoma prairie where she spent her childhood summers.

"She's never overbearing, never assuming," says one police officer who works with Young in domestic violence crisis situations. (The officer is not being named because of the confidential nature of the work.) "I love the personality and the way she deals with victims, the calmness she brings to a situation. It's more like a grace."

It's ironic that she brings the same principles to work at weddings as she does for women in crisis. "I try to be the eye of the storm," she says, "the one who reassures people, who brings people to a sacred space."

Given her status as an outsider, her ability to unite people is at first surprising and then understandable. The startling combination of her dark skin and silvery eyes hints at her ancestry --African-Americans, the Eastern Cherokee and Lumbee Indians of North Carolina, the Black Creek of Alabama (they were escaped or freed slaves who were taken in by the Creek tribe); there's even an Irish doctor.

She was one of the few dark faces in the mostly white, working-class neighborhood in the university town of Evanston, Ill., in the 1950s and ¤'60s, and she married a Jewish man from New York whom she met while living in Santa Fe in the 1970s.

"It makes you reserved, observant," Young says, seated in her sun-washed living room. "You become" -- she sighs -- "a facilitator. You want to make peace. You want to make a place for yourself."

Come together
When New Jersey lawmakers passed civil union legislation for gay couples in 2006, Yael Silverberg and her longtime partner, Tacy Urian, decided to formalize their relationship, and they wanted Young to be part of the ceremony.

Silverberg had met Young through Montclair's Conversations on Race program, a small-group discussion series about race. Young had gone through the program and later became its coordinator; she facilitated Silverberg's group.

"She was just so grounded," says Silverberg (now Silverberg-Urian). "She was so able to take everything that people were kind of struggling with and put it in a positive light."

Silverberg is Jewish and Urian is Filipino, so Young, along with a Reconstructionist rabbi, worked with the couple and their daughter, Tova, to write a ceremony that would reflect both of their cultures.

They married under a chuppah, the Jewish wedding canopy, and wore barongs, the white embroidered tunics common at Filipino weddings. Instead of the seven blessings traditionally recited by a rabbi, they wrote their own, and according to Filipino custom, they were draped with a golden organza veil and bound inside a cord in the shape of a figure eight, the symbol for everlasting love. (They briefly considered catering the affair with the traditional Filipino roasted pig, but Silverberg's mother drew the line at that.)

More than a year later, Silverberg still talks about the ceremony with a sense of awe: "You kind of feel with the way she speaks, that she kind of puts this circular feeling around everybody, so you're all encapsulated into this energy."

Lessons learned
Young's paternal grandfather hailed from Shelby, N.C., near the South Carolina border, but when the federal government relocated the Native American population out west, he fled with his family into the mountains. In 1909, he decided to rejoin his Cherokee relatives in Oklahoma, and packed up his seven kids in a wagon and headed west.

Young's father grew up in Holdenville, about 80 miles southeast of Oklahoma City, and that's where Young spent her summers, horseback riding through the grasslands and exploring the dusty prairie town that still sported a hitching post in front of the J.C. Penney catalog store. There, she says, she learned what quiet sounded like.

Her parents met in Chicago. Her father had been married twice by then (Young was born an aunt) and had always been spiritual, but not religious. Her mother, on the other hand, grew up Baptist, raised by her insurance salesman uncle, the only black man in Auburn, Ala., to own his own car.

It became clear that Young favored her father in spiritual matters when she returned home from Sunday school at the local Unitarian Church with a drawing of the grass and the sky. "My mother's comment was, 'Where's Baby Jesus?'" Young says with a laugh.

"I always had a sense of where I was on the Earth, and that everything is alive one way or another."

In her hometown of Evanston, Ill., most of the African-Americans lived on one side of town, and her family settled in a mostly white neighborhood. "Kids can get mean" is all she really says.

The teachers weren't much better. They automatically placed her in the slow reading group in kindergarten, until her mother went to school, ordered her to stand up and spell the word "telephone" for the teacher.

She joined an equestrian Girl Scout troop, and on a horseback riding trip to Estes Park, Colo., she fell in love with the West, eventually deciding to attend the University of Denver. She didn't graduate and moved on to Aspen in the early 1970s, holding down odd jobs, mostly waitressing.

Young seems like the kind of woman who gleans some inner truth from every experience, no matter how mundane. Being a waitress was no different: It taught her that she didn't want to be one. "That wasn't the way I wanted to interact with people."

She moved back to Evanston for a spell, studying film, working as a production assistant, running a boutique that sold vintage clothes and imported jewelry and handicrafts, and singing back-up for a bar band, but she couldn't quell the urge to move on.

In 1978, she bought an orange Fiat and decided to drive to every town she thought she might like to live in. By the time she rolled into Santa Fe, she needed to change her oil, but had stripped the wrench she had been using. Someone recommended a local mechanic named Murray, and that's how she met her husband.

Family and activism
Murray Kravitz, an open-faced man with a long, gray braid, says he was immediately drawn to Young, but she says that his macho attitude put her off. (He doesn't deny the attitude.) But they both needed a roommate and they wound up sharing a house -- she lived on the first floor, he stayed in the basement.

The setup lasted about six weeks. "He had some good tricks," Young says with a smile. "He threatened to treat my car like everyone else's."

But Kravitz sealed the deal one afternoon when a friend of his came to visit. Young answered the door, and the pal clearly hadn't been expecting a dark-skinned woman to answer. She overhead the friend make a derogatory comment about her to Kravitz, and the next thing she knew, Kravitz had tossed him out the door. "I thought, 'This guy has guts. He has convictions. He gets it.'"

They married in 1980 and started a family soon after. Dwight came first, followed by Alana two years later. By 1986, though, the couple knew they couldn't send their kids to Santa Fe's then-subpar school system, and Kravitz's brother, who ran the family hardware business in New York, needed help.

They moved to Queens, where Young threw herself into her children's education, becoming active in school committees and serving as the first black woman president of the PTA at the elite Hunter College High School, which Dwight attended.

Young was a curiosity in Santa Fe, where the African-American community was minuscule, but she felt like a nonentity in New York. She perceived dismissiveness at the grocery store, at the deli. "People would call me 'sir' because they wouldn't even look up," she says. After a few years, she discovered an intertribal Native American group and eventually became a clan mother, helping to settle disagreements between members and overseeing rituals and ceremonies.

She also became active in Native American causes, working to protect burial grounds from development and protesting the statue of Teddy Roosevelt astride a horse, a Native American and African clinging to his legs, in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Her son jokes that she probably has an FBI dossier several inches thick.

"When we were growing up, they used to tell us that all the Indians on the East Coast were wiped out by Columbus. They're all extinct," Young says. "You know, as a Native American, that you're not extinct."

Gentle presence
If there's one thing that Young is not, it's an entertainer. She wears emblems of her Native American heritage with pride -- a silver Hopi maze earring in one ear, a wood and stone choker around her neck -- but she won't put on a show for couples looking to add a touch of the exotic to their wedding day.

"I'm not there to lay a veneer over your ceremony that doesn't really belong there," she says.

About four years ago, Young decided to channel her Native American ceremonial experience and long-held interest in world religions into a year-long certificate program at Celebrant USA, the Montclair-based foundation that trains people to officiate at weddings, baby namings, funerals and other change-of-life events.

For a wedding, for example, she'll ask the couple to conceptualize their married life and discuss what roles they want to take on. She researches cultural traditions and sometimes consults Scripture to customize each ceremony.

"She does have a presence," says Kravitz, who often accompanies Young to the celebrations. "She takes over the room, not with a loud voice, but with a steadiness. People just tend to look at her and listen to her. It's almost like your mom is speaking. Everybody just quiets down and listens."

Additional insight:How she felt about Barack Obama's election win: "I cried. I laughed. The next morning I turned on the TV to make sure that he was still president, that they hadn't changed the rules overnight." Multiculturalism will run in the family: Her son, Dwight, 28, a cognitive researcher at the National Institutes of Health, two years ago married a native of Madras, India. Daughter Alana, 26, is engaged to a man who's half-Haitian, half-Lebanese; she helps run the family hardware store in Manhattan. Future ambition: To become a grandmother. "I am so ready."